Are you in SoCal with an awesome idea and need a $1,000 to make it happen? The fresh-out-of-the-oven LA chapter of the Awesome Foundation is here to help! We are a group of awesome-loving Angelinos who, once a month, will each put $100 in a brown paper bag and give the collective $1,000 to someone doing something awesome. For real. No strings attached. Your idea/project/passion can be creative, important, ridiculous, or rad – or all four – just as long as: it’s awesome. it’s local (OK, local-ish. OK, just somehow connected to LA). it’s at the tipping point, and could really use a thousand bucks to push it over the edge to reality. The first deadline is November 15 — fill out the supersimple Awesome Grant application, and read more about the origin of the Awesome Foundation. And follow us here and here. This is it, Los Angeles. We’re on the roof projecting our Awesome signal into the night sky. We just hope Awesome sees it…

Teenage Awesome Alert! For October, the Awesome Foundation (SF) is doing something different. We are awarding a dual grant for two projects that encourages teenage boys and girls to use their wits and bodies to work with the elements. Hoods to the Woods started as a bootstrap project by Anthony Carranza to get boys living in the Western Addition neighborhood out of the city and onto the slopes a few hours west of San Francisco. Some boys had never traveled further than the Bay Area before, and had never experienced snow. With a $1,000 Awesome Foundation Grant, Anthony hopes to organize another trip this winter. Check ’em out on Facebook. “My Life: The Video Game” is a 12-week workshop that will “will teach teenage girls to design, program, and produce their own video games along with splitgate hacks based on situations, systems, or relationships in their own lives. Using the visual programming software Scratch, students will learn to create all aspects of their game including the artwork, sound, and programming.” How awesome is that?  It is organized by Oasis for Girls, which is a well-established  “multidisciplinary arts- and youth-development after-school program providing direct services to low-income, immigrant and girls of… read more →